How Britain became the toast of Broadway

Last week Billy Elliot won 10 Tony awards in New York, crowning a glorious year for British theatre at home and abroad. The following morning we caught up with Stephen Daldry, the award-winning musical's director, to talk about this theatrical renaissance, juggling stage and film projects - and his complex love life.

Billy Elliot actors David Alvarez, Kiril Kulish and Trent Kowalik at the 63rd Annual Tony Awards, Radio City Music Hall, New York. Photograph: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Last Monday morning at eight o'clock I was hired to hijack Stephen Daldry.

A scant few hours earlier, his Broadway musical Billy Elliot had won a record-breaking 10 Tony Awards, and even fewer hours earlier he returned from the party. He was presumably still asleep when I spoke to his PR, who said: "I know he'll be delighted to see you, Gaby, it's just that, well ... he doesn't know that yet. But he's leaving for the airport at 10.30, so if you could just be outside his house, you could get in the car ..."

Call it what you will - charm, exhilaration, Stockholm syndrome - Daldry takes his kidnapping remarkably well. "Come up, darling," he says over the intercom, and greets me cheerily in his sprawling, low-key New York apartment before taking me to a diner across the street. (His flight has been delayed; we now have time for breakfast.) Daldry is spindly and quick - to move, to think, to laugh. As we walk he pulls a crumpled packet from his pocket and lights up one of many "last" cigarettes. "Today is a new day," he says purposefully. In the restaurant he orders an omelette and a coffee and throws his whole body on to the red vinyl seat. "Ugh!" he groans, "I'm dead!"

He is recovering from a night he describes as one of the most stressful experiences of his life. "I don't want to be glib about award ceremonies," Daldry says, "but I'm not their biggest fan." He was most nervous for the three teenage boys who alternate in the title role (David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish), who ended up winning a unique joint Tony for best actor. Then they had a big party, and one thing Daldry loves about Billy Elliot are the parties that follow on its coat-tails. There are so many children in the cast that every party turns into "sort of a Polish wedding". He left this one at 2am, whereupon he resisted the temptation to go to the party for Hair.

"Fewer kids at the Hair party," I suggest.

He nods. "A lot of smoking at the Hair party."

Daldry passes me his phone to show me a funny email he's just received from Richard Curtis. Curtis sends his congratulations, and ends with the suggestion that Daldry might consider running for prime minister next: "There may be a vacancy." Daldry shakes his head and smiles. "Sweetheart," he says.

The New York Billy Elliot is a wonderful production full of incredible performers, but whatever its theatrical merits, it's hard to beat the magnificent weirdness of watching hundreds of Americans listening to an Elton John song called "Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher", or the sheer surreal joy of seeing Arthur Scargill's face on Broadway.

Daldry finds this "wickedly amusing", too. He's been working on Billy Elliot - first the film and then different incarnations of the musical - for 10 years now, and he still finds it very moving. "It still takes me by surprise that it's a story about this little place in the north-east of England and what happened during the miners' strike, and this little story about this town is a story on Broadway." The show was due to come to New York sooner but Daldry ended up working on The Reader, his most recent film, for two full years. "As it happened," he says, "the timing was good because suddenly the economy tanked and a story about a community fighting for its survival felt like it was topical."

Though Daldry's success may be unique on Broadway - no British musical has ever won as many Tonys as this one did last week - it has been seen as proof of a boom in British theatre more generally. One might have expected the recession to hit theatres hard, yet people in the UK are going in droves this year; according to figures released 10 days ago by the Society of London Theatre, attendance at plays this past quarter is up by almost 30% on the same period last year. And the boom is not just about quantity: there's Helen Mirren as Phèdre, Jude Law as Hamlet, Sam Mendes's Bridge Project at the Old Vic and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Duke of York's. This has been hailed as an exceptional period for drama in Britain, the effects of which extend far beyond its shores: almost a third of all Tony nominations this year went to Brits.

Whether this golden moment has come about despite or because of the political and economic apocalypse is up for debate. "When times get bad, cinema becomes more conservative and the theatre becomes more imaginative," Daldry says. I ask him to give examples. "Well, I don't want to go too far back," he replies, "but Weimar Germany, turn of the century in England, turn of the century in Russia ... and I think that right now the theatre is more imaginative than it's been in a long time."

Nevertheless, he thinks that on the whole the current confluence of British talent exists regardless of the recession. "My honest answer is you can never underestimate the importance of inspired individuals who are running either organisations, buildings or companies," he says. "And I think we're very lucky to have Nick Hytner at the National Theatre, Dominic [Cooke] at the Royal Court and Michael [Attenborough] at the Almeida. There are just a lot of really good, imaginative artistic directors out there at the moment, doing fantastic work."

Beyond this happy coincidence, Daldry suggests, "the reimagining of what a theatre audience is - that [executive director] Nick Starr has been doing for example at the National Theatre - is genuinely revolutionary." If all serious theatre is the theatre of dissent, he says, "it's taken a decade or two to realise that that dissent has no coherence about it. The notion of dissent being essentially a liberal, left-wing thing is not true - dissent can be a whole variety of different things."

So, where once there was a unified body of people who formed, say, a National Theatre audience, now, Daldry explains, "people will come for individual pieces of work". Daldry ran the Gate Theatre in London for three years, then went on to run (and oversee a wholesale revival of) the Royal Court for six. "The audience for one play at the Royal Court to the next play are not necessarily the same people at all," he goes on. "Don't expect, require or yearn for a crossover - allow that diversity, celebrate the fact that you're going to get different people in on different nights for different shows, embrace it and allow that to be your policy. Once you get into that idea, it changes how you think about what you're programming, how you market it. It changes the age make-up of that audience, the race make-up of that audience."

What this means is both that what's on offer is more varied and less risk-averse, and that a greater proportion of the populace has a stake in it. Theatre, Daldry asserts, is "part of the national conversation - in a way that the movies are not". He interrupts himself to apologise for the generalisation before going on to say, "Theatre is of the conscious mind, whereas movies are of the unconscious mind."

That makes movies sound more interesting, I say.

"Maybe they are," he replies. "I'm not pitching one against the other. I'm just talking about the idea of being part of a national debate. In America, movies are more dominant because they're not so language-based, and this is a country with a cacophony of languages. In England we have, on the whole, one language and our theatre is more important."

When Daldry made the film version of Billy Elliot nine years ago he became one of very few who have worked, with equal comfort and to parallel acclaim, on both stage and screen. One of the proudest achievements of his life remains, he says, the redevelopment of the Royal Court theatre, and his three movies - Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader, have totted up a good few Oscars and many nominations between them.

In both film and theatre he frequently works with David Hare ("we are like a married couple," Daldry says). Hare praises Daldry's versatility. "Theatre directors have always made terrible film directors," Hare told me recently. "The two don't seem to mix - until this new generation of Stephen Daldry, Sam Mendes and John Crowley, who seem able to go from one to the other without strain. Best of all, having had success in cinema, none of them want to abandon theatre. Many of us in the theatre like them for that. They all have their values straight."

Daldry has just directed a New York production of Hare's dual monologues, Berlin/Wall, and later this morning he's leaving for Tokyo, Melbourne and Shanghai to promote The Reader. Then he's embarking on another film - rumoured to be an adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, though Daldry won't confirm this because "the movie industry is so fragile at the moment that I don't think you actually know you're going to make a movie until you're making it". Meanwhile, he's going to take advantage of the long-haul flights to catch up on some sleep, organise his photo albums and give up smoking.

He gets up to go outside. "Do you mind?" he says, "I'm going to smoke myself to death." He looks at his watch. "I've only got an hour."

Daldry decided he wanted to be a director at the age of 15. His mum was a local amateur cabaret "artiste", as he puts it, and he would go and watch her shows. That, combined with the influence of a schoolteacher, help from a woman who ran the local youth theatre, and a life-altering production of Hair, led him to believe directing was "definitely the best fun" you could have.

"I never went to the cinema," he remembers. "You know, film directors always have this Cinema Paradiso story about when they fell in love with the movies. I never had it. It was always theatre for me." Hair was the first professional show he saw, and "me and my school friend thought it was the best thing ever. They were naked!" he laughs, and adds: "It was helped by the fact that I was in love with my friend."

It was around that time, too, that Daldry's father died of cancer of the bladder. There was a long period when he was ill at home, the effect of which, Daldry says now, was that "to me as a kid it allowed me a lot more freedom". Then he adds, unusually gnomically: "More freedom than you might expect."

Clever, coherent and unswervingly commercial as Daldry's artistic output has been, the style of his personal life is what you might call lived-in avant-garde. He doesn't come across as neurotic or even particularly complicated, but that may be because he has embraced so much of what anyone else might call complication.

Daldry is a big advocate of communal living. In the flat I've just visited, which appears to have endless rooms unfolding from a long, wonky corridor and where Ed Harris was filmed jumping out of the window in The Hours, Daldry lives with his wife Lucy Sexton (an American performance artist and his best friend of 20 years), their six year-old daughter Annabel, a younger girl named May-May they are bringing up as their own, one of May-May's biological parents, two mental healthcare workers, and an indeterminate number of semi-permanent inhabitants.

"It's literally an old-fashioned 60s commune," says Daldry, who plans to adopt some more kids now that he and Lucy are almost 50 ("the more kids the merrier"). His children go to the local state school, they don't have a nanny because they can all take the childcare in turns ... In short, it sounds idyllic. Just one thing: for 13 years Daldry was in a relationship with the set designer Ian MacNeil. How did he wind up married to a woman?

How long have you and Lucy been married? I ask.

"About eight years," he says.

Because you decided you wanted kids?

"Yeah," he says, and pauses only slightly before adding, "Well, you know, I mean: I'm gay."

There is no hedging with Daldry. He recently explained that yes, he does have sex with his wife, but if anyone asks, he always says he's gay because it's easier and people prefer it. "They don't like the confusion," he shrugs.

How does his wife feel about being married to a gay man? I ask.

"You'd have to ask her," he says. "But do you know what I honestly think? I think one of the great things about our marriage is, we're never going to get a divorce, and we don't have to worry about infidelity. To marry your best friend is one of the great gifts of life, and to have kids with your best friend is fantastic."

The family travels frequently, shuttling between New York and a grand old home outside London. As for Daldry himself, he spends half his life in the air. I ask him if he minds flying, and his reply suggests a good deal about his casual exigency and the way he faces complexity with panache. He is, he confesses, a "fussy" flier. I expect him to say, perhaps, that he insists on a window seat, or that he always travels with a certain pair of talismanic socks. Oh no.

"Seats aren't important," Daldry elaborates. "It's airlines, and: how old is the aircraft? Is the aircraft leased or owned by the airline? I don't like leased aircraft because I know the maintenance contracts are subcontracted.

"And sometimes, you know, like this trip, I sort of do want to see a picture of the aeroplane, to see whether I want to go on it. I have been on aeroplanes - I mean checked in, gone on and sat down, and gone: I don't like this. It doesn't feel right."

I can't help laughing. That's happened to me before, too, but I call it a panic attack. To Daldry, it's just being a bit fussy. And with that, he jumps up from his seat. "Now look," he says, dashing out of the door, "I've got to go to Tokyo!"